Hi, y'all. Welcome to another wonderful
WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton
here at WebTegrity in San Antonio, Texas [USA].
Today, for WordPress Wednesday, we're going to walk through —
actually, we're going to go back — go back to the total basics.
How to set up your home page with static content. And,
how to say where you want your Blog articles to appear inside your website.
It's a simple thing, but if nobody has ever showed you, it can get very confusing.
Before I get started, you know what I have to do. I've got to give a
shout out to our amazing sponsors and partners in crime.
And helping you with the WordPress world.
WPEngine has incredible hosting. They have staging sites for you
so, if you want to tinker and play around with your website
and don't want to mess up what the live version looks like, you
can get a staging site with their incredible hosting service.
Check them out.
We also have WPElevation. If you're an entrepreneur
using WordPress or it you're a small business owner or
a freelancer, for that matter, using WordPress to make a living,
you need to check their Tracks. Troy is an incredible guy.
He's from Australia. He's got a great accent that's
fun to listen to (and not bad to look at either).
And WP101. Another great company doing amazing WordPress
videos. He slows down. He doesn't talk nearly as quickly as I do.
He gives you step by step, beautiful, clear instructions
on how to use WordPress better. They have free videos as well
as a wonderful paid environment that you can get into and really
find some dynamic cool videos.
Let's talk about setting up your home page. How do you do it?
By default (let's go back for a second) By default, WordPress thinks that you
want to use your website for a blog. And that's not always the case.
Sometimes you want to have a Blog inside of it, but it would be nice
to go ahead and maybe have a welcome paragraph or something
on the home page that folks can read that's more static.
And then maybe you want them to click somewhere else
to get to your blog area, right?
How do we do that?
I'm going to walk you through where those settings are
inside of WordPress. You're going to log into your dashboard.
On the left side of your navigation over here you've got an area
called Settings. You go into [the subheading] Reading.
You've got an option right up here.
It's basically asking -What do you want to display on your front page
of your Website? -By default, this option
is typically selected (Your latest posts).
So, again, it thinks again that you want to use this
Website for a blog. By default, when I go to
my homepage on WPWD.com (WordPress Wednesday.com),
we have all of our posts— all of our helpful tutorial videos—
sitting here. But if I just want a static bit of
information to sit there— maybe a welcome area—
I can actually click this option [A static page (select below)]
and then these two selections [Front page: and Posts page:]
become available for me. I can open this up
and I can choose Home Page [from the drop down menu].
Now, you would have already had to make that page.
And I have already made a Home Page. I just put
one line of content just specifically for this tutorial.
If I select Home Page, I can go ahead and click
Save Changes. Now, when I go back to the front side of my website
and click Refresh, WordPress knows to not display all of my posts
(those are gone). Now it just displays whatever I have inside of that page.
When I go to [Pages] All Pages, you can see in my Home Page
here that I only have [the phrase] "all of our content." [laughing]
That's the one line I have sitting there and, of course,
that's visible here. You could obviously put
anything you want into this space. Fill it up. Put some images.
Put a video, if you wanted to. Whatever you wanted, and
click Publish or Update and now this could be your Home Page content.
The other thing that some authors might give you an option for
to designate what your Home Page is, is actually sitting inside this
Home Page area. So, if doing what I just told you does NOT work,
you have two other potential options. You can come into your Home Page
area like this [Pages, All Pages, Home Page] and check and see
if the author has given you some sort of a Template option over here
[right side of screen] that might have a drop down option that says
Home Page. That's the way the author has designated you
to set your content on your Home Page.
The second option that I wanted to remind you of is look at the
documentation. Every Theme out there, especially with a premium
Theme that you have purchased, should have incredible documentation from
the author. Inside that Zip file that you originally downloaded–
dive back in there, open it up, and see if you can find anything in there
that says Documentation, How Tos, Read me First. Click on that and
you should be able to find a step-by-step instructional guide
on how to set up, install, set up, import demo content (maybe),
how to use their shortcode system. Some authors give you so much
love in there it's incredible. They really walk you through
everything in there step-by-step.
That's how you would set up your Home Page to static content.
What if I wanted a page now in my Menu.
Let's say up at the top up here.
What if I wanted up here at the top of my Menu area
to have a link that says Blog? I don't want it on my Home Page
but I do want it accessible. You come in here [Pages]
and click Add New and we would simply just create a page
called Blog or Resources or whatever you would want that
to be. And then you just click Publish [on the right of screen].
You wouldn't put anything inside here [pointing to the empty content area].
Just go ahead and click Publish. And now we have a
[Blog] page designated for the articles to dynamically display.
There's one more step. You still have to go into Settings.
Go back to Reading. And, see this? It says Posts page:
Now, because I've already made that page, I can choose Blog
and click Save [Changes]. But, that's still not up on my
main Menu. I've got to go add that. So, I've got to go into
Appearance. Go to Menus. Be sure I'm on the correct Menu
which is my Main (Primary Menu) at the top of my website.
So, now I've got my Blog page over here. I can click Add to Menu.
And maybe I want that to be my second option so I drag and drop it.
And click Save Menu. Now when I go back to the front side of my
website and click Refresh, my second option should be Blog.
When I click on there, all of my Posts should dynamically display.
Just like they originally did on my Home Page. How groovy cool is that?
And, of course, inside of that Settings, Reading area you can kind of designate
do you want it to be full text, meaning do you want the entire article to display
on that really long page, or do you want maybe just a snippet or summary
that offers the Read More option where they can click in and go to the
actual Post article and read the whole darn thing over there, right?
You can also designate how many you want to display on one page
at a time. If you're doing like what I'm doing with our Blog posts
I could potentially say I want 20 because I really don't write
text, I just have videos sitting there. It would be incredible to have a lot
of videos on one page. I typically leave this
[Blog pages show at most] at 10. And, as you all saw earlier,
I always have my posts on my Home Page. I'm going to set
everything back [to the way it was] here. Click Save Changes.
I'll go through and take that off the menu. I hope that helped you all.
If you all have questions about your WordPress website, would
you consider putting them in the description box below or Tweet us.
That's always an option. I'll put our Twitter handle
in the description box below.
We'll catch you all next WordPress Wednesday.
Thank so much. Bye bye, y'all. [Kori Ashton, Webtegrity.com]